This is Social Commerce E-Book

Guy Clapperton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 253

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The first book to market on the hottest topic on the web

Social commerce is the new buzz word and this book will be the first to cut through the hype and tell you exactly what it all means... and how to do it. Social media has moved on, it's not enough to just be engaging your customers in fun chit-chat, now you can sell to them directly through their favourite social media platform. ASOS, the fashion website, have just set up a commerce site on Facebook and people are scrambling to follow in their footsteps. No longer do you have the nightmare of dragging people from their social networking site to your homepage – you can get them buying right where they are! In this follow up to This Is Social Media Guy Clapperton uses the same easy-to-follow visuals and instructions to break the process down and show you exactly how to set up your own social commerce operation and how to make it a success.

Includes:

• Step-by-step guide to setting up your own commerce site within social media platforms such as Facebook
• Building a loyal community who will keep coming back and buying from you
• How to offer superb customer service to your social media consumers
• Developing new product especially for this new environment
• Measuring your ROI

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

INTRODUCTION: THE DEATH OF ATTENTION

The new demographic

Mobile social

What this book isn’t

What this book is

1 WELCOME TO SOCIAL COMMERCE

An early social business: Naked Wines

The existing model

Like minds

Not just for wine

Flexibility: interacting where you want

Developing a theme

In with the old, in with the new

Technology and legality

2 DIVING IN

Groupon and its ilk

Location-based services: Facebook and FourSquare

Transactions on Facebook

The Facebook app

Give us a fiver – raising social capital through social media

Footnote for the future: Google Plus

3  GETTING NEW CUSTOMERS IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA AGE

Hey you, want a bargain?

Suit you, sir (or madam)

Individual tones

Hard cash

Dell

Public sector

Results

4 SUBTLE SELLING

Selling for England

Facebook: A great venue for engagement

What’s on the page

Soft sell

Company strategy

Bluebeards ahoy: Conversing with partners

5  CUSTOMERS AND BEYOND – THE DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES YOU CAN TALK TO

Social media for explaining stuff

Developing the game and monitoring the results

International appeal

The colour of money

Customers: it’s not just about text

Honda gets appy

6  BUILDING A COMMUNITY

Selecting the right network

Hashtags

Other networks

Getting the ‘world wide’ out of the web

Funding and managing

Peer reviews

Registering for the local sites

Proactively encouraging your community

E-newsletter contents

Making it seem individual

Community

7 NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

Brave new products – a word about research and development

‘Ice cream, you scream’

The tone before social

Entering a conversation

Payback time: the research

Costs

Product research

Content and tone

Recruitment is king

Does it work?

Listening to what works

8  MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Your digital shadow

Corporate digital: Sage advice

Measuring the effect and gaining influence

Klout

Bloggers and other influencers

Getting information to them

Ways of engaging

Communicating with different audiences

9  SHOW ME THE MONEY – MEASURING ROI

Hey you, want a free iPad?

Just enough cooks

Biccies

The solicitor will see you now

Social media as a gateway to action

POSTSCRIPT

Index

This edition first published 2012

© 2012 Guy Clapperton

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clapperton, Guy.

 This is social commerce : turning social media into sales / Guy Clapperton.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-857-08241-1 (pbk.)

 1. Electronic commerce—Social aspects. 2. Internet marketing—Social aspects. 3. Cooperative societies.

4. Consumer cooperatives. 5. Online social networks. 6. Social media. I. Title.

 HF5548.32.C53 2012

 658.8'72—dc23

2011044312

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-857-08241-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-857-08253-4 (ebk)

ISBN 978-0-857-08254-1 (ebk) ISBN 978-0-857-08255-8 (ebk)

INTRODUCTION: THE DEATH OF ATTENTION

It’s early winter and I’ve been invited to give a keynote speech to a conference. It’s about social media and whether it’s really making money for people or not, and whether it’s performing as a business tool. As I try to find the venue, someone I’ve never met points me in the right direction.

They’ve recognized me from my picture on Twitter, which is flattering. I wonder, perhaps idly, how many other people half-recognize people from their Twitter streams these days – it’s a network that encourages communication with strangers after all.

I get to the venue and make my introductions. My turn to speak arrives and I look out at the audience. Many are looking at me but an equal number are looking down at laptops, at a phone in their hands. I try to get their attention, joking, being serious, but nothing appears to be working. It’s only after the conference that I see why, when I’m on the train home. I check my Twitter stream on my phone and find that it’s packed with mentions of me.

They don’t all agree with what I was saying by any means, which suits me fine – anyone can do a presentation that scratches people’s egos. But all these people, the ones who had their heads down, were actually discussing the content of my presentation, for and against, with people who either were or weren’t there.

I start my next presentation another time with ‘Hello, the top of everybody’s heads.’ Nobody gets it – they really don’t know they’re doing it. A few months later I attend a meeting of the Professional Speaking Association and one of the speakers asks people not to do this. If you’re in the room, please be present in the room, he says.

I don’t think I’d have the guts to do that. And anyway I’m more interested in the psychology of what’s happening to the people in the audience. OK, they’re younger than me, I admit it – but something about their attitude has changed. Here’s a diagram of how speaking has worked until now:

The speaker speaks first, then within a split second the audience hears and ingests what he or she has said. It’s only much later that the audience starts spreading the word – if you’re lucky. A timeline might run:

2pm: Speaker presents at a breakout session. Audience assimilates immediately.2.30pm: Session breaks up, audience starts chatting, information still largely confined to audience.3pm: Coffee break, information might start spreading around primarily among people attending the conference6pm: Social time – content starts disseminating around people who weren’t there – colleagues, friends.

This diagram can now be changed for a more modern audience thus:

The speaker is presenting to two audiences, one he or she can see and one he or she can’t. The invisible audience is feeding back to the audience in the room and they’ll be feeding back to the speaker too, assuming there’s a decent question and answer session. Some presenters might even have a live feed of comments running on a screen in the background so that they can interact with their absentee audience on the spot. It’s worth keeping an eye on these though – there’s always some joker who wants to get a cheap laugh by making a rude comment about the speaker! The new timeline looks something like this:

3pm: Speaker starts presentation.3.01: Tweeting and Facebook commentaries start about the content and the style.3.01 and a bit: People in different continents start seeing content and commenting on it.

This is how the new audience is starting to behave. You can call them generation Y if you like and a lot of marketers do, but it’s not so much an age-based generation as a technology and communications affair. It’s not just kids doing this – people in their forties, fifties, and beyond are Tweeting, updating their Facebook entries, and bringing interactions into real time.

The New Demographic

The audience is changing and it’s changing because of what we now categorize as social media. That much isn’t in any doubt; just how they’re changing and what their expectations are needs to be understood by anyone who wants to sell to them. And in spite of the noise that’s been made about sharing everything and how selfless the social media and its advocates are, selling is still an important concept.

A couple of years ago, News International decided to put The Times newspaper behind a paywall. If you wanted to see more than today’s paper and you weren’t a registered subscriber, you had to pay. Meanwhile, there were huge amounts of freebies around the place. Companies like Google were giving away office software in their Google Docs suite, while Facebook and Twitter were giving away free social networking applications.

In the presentation mentioned earlier, I asked whether people were using any of these and basing their business planning on the fact that they didn’t have to pay. A number confirmed that they were using Google Docs as their only office tools. They didn’t see any problem in this, since they were marketing themselves through Facebook and Twitter as well.

However, my point to them, and to you, is that this won’t be sustainable forever. It needs to be paid for by someone, and the person using the service is the most likely candidate. At some point, the businesses behind these applications will have to make their transactions about money rather than continue to give them away. Social networking-based businesses need to be realistic and so do their customers; if a company isn’t making money it will eventually have to drop a service, and if your business is dependent on that service you’ll need a ‘plan B’ in case that service ever stops. Expecting it all for nothing in perpetuity is not reasonable.

When making these suggestions at the presentation, the reactions on Twitter and Facebook were sharply divided. A vocal minority felt I was talking sense and that this needed to be said even louder. More people chimed in with disagreements – either respectfully or with comments like ‘Guy Clapperton just doesn’t get it, does he?’ One participant said they hadn’t expected me to speak in favour of News International, and in the post hacking scandal world, that looks a lot more of an obvious point than it did at the time. As one person put it: ‘We do pay, with our contact details and with our friends.’

This is an interesting comment and a view I’d heard before. People honestly feel that they are ‘paying’ for things by offering their friends’ details. Do these friends know they’re being used as hard currency? It seems to suggest a new means of conducting business online. That the relationship moves from a straight customer-pays-supplier route to something a little more like this:

I’m actually pretty suspicious of an equation that looks as though it’s built like that. My main problem is that nowhere does money or anything like it appear. Some people see it as a sort of virtuous circle in which we all end up living by some sort of means of exchange of intellectual property. What I say is, show me how it makes money or I won’t believe it’s sustainable. Adopting it to the exclusion of all other business models appears to me to be risky in the extreme.

My belief – and I suspect the belief of a lot of people buying this book – was, and is, that businesses either supplying or using the social networks need to understand exactly how they will end up paying for themselves. My first book on the subject, This is Social Media, makes a lot out of putting a business plan in place for any social media engagements and ensuring they have a target and an objective. I was surprised at the vehemence with which some people disagreed.

Within a few months of that conference taking place I felt pretty vindicated. The social bookmarking service, Delicious, was going to be sold off or scrapped by its then owner Yahoo! The reason, just as I’d predicted, was that it wasn’t making money. It was a free facility over the Internet, offering people the chance to bookmark their favourite websites either privately with a password or publicly to share on their website or on the social networks.

Yahoo! simply couldn’t see a financial justification for continuing the service. It wasn’t bringing money in and unless someone was missing something fairly substantial it stood no chance of doing so. It managed to sell the service rather than close it but it was clear that a very substantial owner indeed had no interest in continuing with it.

My point is that in spite of the apparent beliefs of some people, the underlying pattern of business and how it happens hasn’t changed. You offer goods or a service and if you find it’s not paying then one of these days you’re going to withdraw it.

Mobile Social

Back to my presentation that day. Afterwards I nip into a bookshop intending to buy a book, or magazine, or something. As I pick up a current paperback to browse through, I glance at the man next to me.

He’s fiddling with his mobile phone.

Nothing uncommon in that, you’re thinking, people fiddle with their phones all the time and everywhere. But he’s fiddling with it in the middle of a book shop and he is looking at the Amazon mobile site.

Look, I understand people shopping around. I have often gone from one January Sale to another, picking among the bargains to find the better price. But I’ve never quite had the brass neck to stand on someone else’s premises and check the price whilst holding the book in my hand.

He may not have been checking prices, of course. He may have had the Kindle app on his phone, and decided to download the book on the spot.

Maybe he wasn’t doing that at all. Maybe he was just finding out whether the book was any good – nobody in the shop was about to tell him. Perhaps he had intended to buy a physical copy for the train but wasn’t sure whether he’d like it or not. So instead of reading the cover, leafing through and taking a chance, he looked at Amazon to see how the book was rated and how many people had bothered to review it.

You might call this ‘social buying.’ People check their purchases not just with friends but with complete strangers before making them. It’s an odd thing until you consider that every review on the back of a book’s jacket is going to be positive – maybe even selectively quoted. Amazon’s readers will be less fettered.

So will TripAdvisor’s readers if you’re going on holiday. So will TopTable’s reviewers if you’re looking for a restaurant, and so on. Customers, particularly large numbers of customers, are starting – consciously or otherwise – to mobilize themselves. The business that’s aware is going to do well out of it; the one that isn’t will find things tougher.

This change towards peer advice through social media is causing actual psychology to change, I’m convinced. I check my Twitter feed and I find a load of people telling me where they are, and telling me their comments on their whereabouts through the new social network called FourSquare. Some of them have become mayors.

Well, no they haven’t – just in FourSquare’s eyes. But they’re stars in their own eyes and they’ve become such by announcing where they are to whoever happens to be following them on Twitter.

A colleague was interested in this so she asked a few young people why they felt compelled to announce where they were the whole time through their social media stream. She was met with shrugs and ‘because it’s social’ and the inference that of course they told people where they were, all their friends did it and you didn’t want to be left out. It was natural to them – a bit like someone of my generation trying to explain why watching entertainment on the television was a normal thing to do if a listener had never seen it.

Social buyers can of course get discounts if they turn up at a FourSquare establishment – or a Facebook Place, or get Groupon tokens. This seems not to be the main reason for the behaviour, though – people’s attitudes to a lot of things are changing. People saying they pay for services with friends’ details, people who see no inconsistency between any notion of privacy and announcing exactly where they are at any particular time – these are new behaviours.

What This Book Isn’t

All that’s been said so far is the backdrop. That’s the new attitude and some of the new expectations against which this book is being written. For all that, though, I’m not here to explain how the new businesses are going to make money using the new financial models and I’m not here to be a middle-aged author going on about how young people always think they can re-invent the universe.

There are people making money in this new scenario and I applaud them. Facebook, for example, has made loads of money in advertising and as a result it’s comfortably in profit and has been for a while – it keeps getting valued for huge amounts by Wall Street and its investors.

I’m not assuming you will become the new Facebook by reading this book. This isn’t a book on how to make a killing in what, for all we know, is another dotcom boom set to come crashing down just like the last one.

This isn’t a psychology book, although I’m sure there’s an interesting one to be written about how this new generation thinks. I’m not qualified to write about it in depth.

What This Book Is

This is a book for people who want their business to adapt to the new digital generation without assuming that all commercial reality has changed – I don’t believe it has. This is the way to cope with this new digitally-aware customer and in particular the commerce they transact. They make groups, they consider the Internet a human right (don’t look at me like that, the European Union agrees), and they expect to behave as a group. This is how to take advantage of the herd mentality when you can be part of the same electronic club that’s bringing the herd together.

I’ve aimed for a book which is practical rather than theoretical. You’ll find many case studies and interviews with people in business who’ve done this stuff in real life, and who are happy to talk about their success, where they’ve fallen short, and – let’s be realistic – where they’ve run out of time. This is business. This is reality. This is social commerce.

1

WELCOME TO SOCIAL COMMERCE

‘Social commerce,’ like the subject often associated with it, social media, isn’t brand new but it’s being done in a brand new way. This chapter should help explain the concept and ensure you’re able to establish whether it will help your business at all. Businesses and customers are changing and the aim of this and every other part of this book is to help you adapt to those changes.

You should also walk away from this chapter with a number of ideas of how to build a following and work out how this can actually help you build up a business.

So what, precisely, do I mean when I talk about social commerce? Many sorts of commerce can be described as ‘social’ and you have to zero in on it a little before it starts to become really meaningful.

Let me explain this with a scenario. Say you want to buy something simple like a pack of butter. How would you describe the process? You go out, get a plot of land, seed it, grow grass, feed a cow, milk the cow, churn the milk, and then scrape the butter off the sides and put it in a packet. Is that right?

No it’s not and you know it. It’s rubbish. But it’s what happens when you go and buy a pack of butter. Somewhere along the line all of that stuff has happened, or something vaguely like it – anyone reading this who’s in agriculture is by now probably killing themselves laughing at my oversimplification. Nonetheless the problem you’d face if you tried to buy everything just for yourself is that it’s impossible to make any economies when you’re just making one-offs.

So you get a bit social. A group of you go to a trader and suggest you want butter. The trader goes to a farmer and says, I can introduce you to this number of people to sell your butter, but you’ve got to bring the price down. The farmer says he or she would be delighted – and that is people being social to make commerce happen. So in order to buy anything at all for what might be thought a reasonable price, you have to be social in some respect otherwise it simply can’t add up. This, at its most basic, is social commerce.

We’re going to have to be a bit more specific than that, obviously. Otherwise everyone will think it’s easy.

Defining Social Commerce

Truer forms of social commerce might be said to have started with the co-operative movement, which survives to the present day not only in the form of the Co-Op but also in experiments like the ‘People’s Supermarket’ movement. The idea here is that a group of individuals get together to bypass the big corporate money-making conglomerates and source their food collectively. They bypass the traditional suppliers and go to smaller producers, the tiny growers on allotments, the farms who’ll deal direct, and they set their own prices. Instead of profit they plough money back in and award themselves dividends, or extra discounts – non-members are welcome to buy but the price will be slightly higher.

This is a little more to do with what I’m going to describe as the modern version of social commerce. It’s not the whole thing, though, and there are parts of the revived model which aren’t wholly relevant. For example, this book isn’t going to be unduly concerned with idealistic principles on whether big or small business should or should not make a profit. We’ll be talking about people like Facebook, Google, and Groupon. These are substantial companies which either have been listed or are heading for it. They have been valued at billions and are doing very nicely out of social commerce, thanks.

This book will take as its thesis that social commerce is commerce made possible when a large group of suppliers meets a large group of buyers, and they haggle as groups and achieve the best possible price. The medium through which this happens is the Internet, just because it’s the easiest way of getting so many people together.

That’s not all this book is going to be about. That’s the most pure form of ‘social commerce’ by all means but there’s another facet, an overlay that seems to have invited itself along during the 21st century. That was the subject of my previous book, This is Social Media. Social media or social networking (the terms are interchangeable) allows the customer to communicate directly with the producer and to have a conversation. The producer gets to know the customer and can detect trends – among the more voluble customers anyway. The producer can publicize, cajole people into taking part and buying, float ideas, research the likely responses.

As I said in the Introduction, a lot of this is happening because the customer has changed and is now digitally aware. There are lots of clichés around about how people have become empowered, how the customer is king, how engagement is everything. These are mostly clichés because they’re right. The Internet means the customer has more options to switch suppliers half way through a transaction than ever before. This puts them in the driving seat more than ever before.

This chapter will focus on how the social customer is taking advantage of the sort of deal that has only become possible because mass buying is in place, and how the technology has been harnessed to make deals happen.

An Early Social Business: Naked Wines

Overall the aim of a social commerce-oriented business is to make the customer feel part of the company even when they’re not technically a shareholder. This is something at which Naked Wines has been very good indeed. There is much to be gained from observing how the business makes people feel they are part of something, so the rest of this chapter will take this example in some depth.

Naked Wines is a wine club based in the UK – Norwich to be specific. It operates completely online; there are no shop fronts, no wine warehouses to visit. It is a classic example of the electronic medium introducing buyers and sellers.

There were attempts at making this happen much earlier; you might recall companies like Letsbuyit.com, which had the idea of bringing together small business customers, getting them to act en bloc and buying printers, computers, and so forth at good prices. The pitch to the seller was that these people were effectively acting like a much larger enterprise.

The reason for the failure at that stage, and we’re talking late 1990s here, was that people took impossible positions. Suppliers offered thousands of small businesses tiny discounts, less than they’d typically get from a decent dealer. The businesses, meanwhile, all wanted a top of the range laser printer for a tenner. The positions taken were ridiculous so the idea fell to pieces.

Naked Wines and other modern counterparts prefer to be more realistic, and focus on the achievable. If you want to join Naked Wines and just buy wine cases that’s fine. Nobody’s going to mind, you just go ahead. To get more out of it, though, you become a ‘wine angel.’ This involves sending the organization twenty quid a month. It then puts this into an account for you and you can buy wine with it or have it back if you change your mind – there’s no catch.

It then goes to small wine producers, who don’t get into the supermarkets or bigger wine clubs, and puts a proposition to them. That proposition is: Naked Wines can offer them cash flow because of the regular payments from ‘angels,’ as long as the wine makers in question offer a preferential price to the customers in question.

Business Basics

Very few successful start-ups rely purely on knowledge and experience of “social” . For example, founder Rowan Gormley and his colleagues set up the business after years in the wine trade. This isn’t part of a social commerce but you have to have some experience of a field in order to set up a new business in it. He and his colleagues seek out small wine growers and go and visit them – this isn’t done electronically, there is clearly a need for face-to-face meetings and frankly you can’t taste a bottle of wine over the Internet.

Likewise, elsewhere in the book I’ll be discussing a gent’s barber and how it publicizes itself and attracts ‘members’ electronically, a smoothie drinks maker … many businesses. They all need the offline skills first before they attack the online side.

The Existing Model

The Internet has allowed the gathering together of buyers and sellers to adopt terms and conditions they find mutually beneficial, says founder Rowan Gormley. If individuals were to try to get together and make this sort of deal happen it simply wouldn’t work.

There is an argument that says the financial model on which most of the Western World is based has become flawed because of too many intermediaries. The buyer and seller have so many people between them who need to be paid. The buyer spends money on having products marketed to them, on having products marketed to the wholesaler, on shipments to intermediary points and on a great deal else before their money goes near the actual price of the product. ‘The consumer is getting poor value and the (product) supplier is struggling to make a living and it’s just because of the inefficiency of the way commerce is involved,’ says Gormley. And so the Internet became the mechanism by which companies like Naked Wines are able to get things moving and repair this apparent problem.

It’s not just a matter of saying ‘we’re on the Internet so please send us regular money,’ though. Gormley explains it using his co-founder Francesca Krajewski as an example. ‘Let’s say I introduce Fran as a wine maker and ask if you’d like to give her a hundred quid – you’d say you needed to know more. But if we say to people, “give us twenty quid a month and we’ll sort out immediate delivery and all the boring bits”, we get a response.’

So far so old media – but in this case the social element adds a great deal to the transactions taking place. To stick with the example on the table, Fran doesn’t just ask for money. She introduces herself as a wine maker, tells you about herself, joins a social network, explains the wines on which she is working and why she thinks they’ll be any good. She answers questions, listens to feedback, and the end results feature in her product. People who want to get more involved in the wines they buy have that opportunity.

Obviously this isn’t going to matter to everyone – many people are quite happy picking up their favourite tipple at the supermarket and nobody has a problem with that. This is more focused on competing with the mail order companies who send brochures out claiming that the seller has known a particular wine-making family for years. So rather than read second hand that someone knows the family, you get to engage with them yourself.

Source: www.nakedwines.com